What is Happening in Los Angeles?

The recent days of U.S. media have been filled with a flurry of sensationalist coverage of protests against raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The raids, which aim to detain and deport immigrants, have been taking place with increasing frequency and force in recent months. On June 8, after days of coverage, a more significant number of people could be seen rioting in Los Angeles and other parts of the country. However, the situation is much more complex than any of the news cycles are capable of capturing.

The major protests that thousands of people have participated in have been primarily peaceful, with protestors mainly holding signs and marching. There have been peripheral incidents in places like Compton, a city in the southern part of Los Angeles County, where three gas stations were looted and one car was burned outside a donut shop. The video of the latter has been making the rounds on social media. Videos of intense clashes with the police have been circulating and attributed to the current protests. These also included videos from either the January 6 insurrection in Washington, D.C., in 2021, or from the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.

In the beginning, the Los Angeles residents I spoke to, individuals very familiar with the local history of protests and civil unrest, have described these events as “just another Tuesday,” and have suggested that people often get just as rowdy after a hard-fought Los Angeles Lakers win.

In addition, locals have noted that up until June 7, the protests against ICE were of the usual size they have sustained for months if not longer. The largest of these ranged from 100 to 200 people. The media, to the protesters’ surprise, played a decisive role in inflaming their scale and vivacity and, in due time, created the conditions for 100 to turn into 1,000 people. This is what we saw happen on June 8.

This suggests that while the anger being expressed by protesters is genuine and sincere, external factors including media have been the ones to set the stage for this uprising.

For the Democratic Party-aligned media, they are a justified, popular and spontaneous response to Donald Trump’s cruel immigration policies. For the Republican Party-aligned media, this chaos and looting by some “illegal aliens” (their favorite way of classifying undocumented immigrants), wrecking U.S. communities, is supported by the “treasonous” Democratic Party.

Both narrative framings ignore context and exaggerate disconnected facts. The Republican-aligned media has completely blown out of proportion the actual size and real significance of these protests. The Democratic-aligned media only began to discuss ICE raids and deportations after Trump took office.

One must ask: Why is the liberal media concerned about deportations now? If they were sincere in their outrage at the ICE raids and deportations, why were they silent during the four years when Joe Biden was doing, not just the same, but much more?

This suggests that the liberal discourse around deportations and ICE raids are a smokescreen through which to wrap other grievances that they have against Trump. By instrumentalizing the real anger felt by Mexican Americans, the Democratic Party and its associated media obtain the pretense and appearance of popular discontent with the Trump administration.

This is not to say that the discontent doesn’t exist or that it was merely fabricated by the Democrats, but simply that the object of discontent has held a common presence under both Trump and all previous administrations, suggesting a problem that is rooted less in one or another administration, than in the impersonal system every administration—Democratic or Republican—is forced to operate in.

The real problem that the Democrats have with Trump is not rooted in his positions on immigration, but on his foreign policy. Many Democratic Party officials lament that Trump has betrayed “our allies and friends” in Ukraine and Israel.

The Democratic Party has spun the narrative that Trump’s attempts are a turn to authoritarianism. When this context is understood, I think that the spectacle we are seeing in California is, objectively, just that, a spectacle. It is something prefabricated by the Democratic Party in an attempt to delegitimize and destabilize the Trump administration.

Nonetheless, while the conditions that fermented the increase in protest size are prefabricated, the objective slide into a constitutional crisis, I think, is underway.

Trump federalized the state’s National Guard to crack down on the protests. And he did so in the absence of any clear national emergency, in conflict with the Governor, and in a manner that certainly seemed to be motivated more by politics than necessity.

Therefore, none of the conditions in the Insurrection Act of 1807, in Title 10 of the U.S. Code, nor in the Commander-in-Chief and the Militia Clause of the Constitution are met. This makes Trump’s actions highly controversial at best, unconstitutional at worst.

Governor of California Gavin Newsom, on the other hand, on June 9 spoke about his state’s sovereignty being violated.

The Newsom-Trump feud then escalated to Trump stating that he would consider arresting the Governor, and that “it would be a great thing.”

At best, this could be a tactical assault on the Trump administration by the Democratic Party with the aims of regaining a majority in Congress for the midterms. At worst, this is setting up the conditions for a deepening of a constitutional crisis that could deteriorate into a second American Civil War.

Only time can tell where this clash will end up. What is certain is that, at the time of writing, none of the U.S. media has been able to tell anything resembling the whole, contextualized truth behind the events.

The author is an adjunct professor of philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, the U.S. He is secretary of education for the American Communist Party and author of several books, including The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism. (2023)